Description:*Intro to Cultural Studies* [Tracks C & M] This course examines the pivotal role of culture in the modern world, including the ideas, values, artifacts, and practices of people in their collective lives. Cultural Studies focuses on the importance of studying the material processes through which culture is constructed. It highlights process over product and rupture over continuity. In particular, it presents culture as a dynamic arena of social struggle and utopian possibility. Students read key thinkers and examine critical frameworks from a historical and a theoretical approach, such as Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall and the Birmingham School; the work on popular culture, identity politics, and postmodernism in America; and the emergence of a 'global cultural studies' in which transnational cultural flows are examined and assessed. Class sessions are set up as dialogic encounters between cultural theory and concrete analysis. [Tracks C & M]